There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list

  1. Listen more to more Black people
  2. Post less – and think before you post
  3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
  4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects

Other suggestions?

TheRtRevKaiser ,
@TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org avatar

We’ve removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don’t want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.

sabreW4K3 ,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

I was surprised to see the tone of response I saw in here. I always thought of beehaw as an inclusive instance.

TheRtRevKaiser ,
@TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org avatar

I agree completely. We do work hard to keep things inclusive and nice™ on Beehaw, but Technology is our largest and most active community by a fair margin, and sometimes folks don’t respect the vibe on the instance when they comment - either because they don’t realize what instance the post is on, or because they don’t understand or maybe don’t care to understand the ethos of the instance.

We’ve done some cleanup in the thread, but removals can take time to federate (if they federate at all, which is not guaranteed in my experience. Hopefully the discussion from here out will be more inclusive, but we’ll be keeping a closer eye on the thread in any case.

Beacon ,

Absolute nonsense. The comments you removed weren't saying anything wrong. They were discussing why the OPs draft is unworkable and would have the opposite of the effect they intend.

Kwakigra ,

OP, from this reception you may feel at least a little misunderstood. This is because you are being deliberately misunderstood because whiteness protects itself. Notice that no one commenting thus far has responded to you in good faith, but have only been dismissive or even reject the premise that this even could be a problem outright.

Whiteness is interested in terminating any curiosity that challenges white supremacy. Exclusive white habitus is the expectation of those who identify with whiteness, and deviation is actively resisted. If white people didn’t do this there literally wouldn’t be white people and racism would be over. It persists because the people who maintain it are cultured to protect it by any means, especially by rejecting all challenges to it outside of an historical context.

The reason I say all this is because I’ve attempted the same conversation you are attempting now and this has been what’s happened every single time. You can’t have a good faith conversation with anyone answering in bad faith. I think this effort is worthwhile and support it, but I advise not to waste too much time with anyone here who is more interesting in refuting you than the problem of racism.

thenexusofprivacy OP ,

Thanks much, I very much appreciate the supportive words! And, great analysis, thanks for that as well. Although, if you think things are bad here you should see the lemmy.world thread, where it’s down to -47. And just imagine how much worse it would be if I were Black!

floofloof ,

Some of the replies here are a bit disheartening, reflexively dismissing this list, the need for it, and the validity of the experiences behind it.

SweetCitrusBuzz ,
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

It’s unsurprising, sadly. Folks are stuck in their bubbles often and don’t see the harm they cause.

They wrap it up in fancy words or reasoning sadly, but the reasons are always the same basically: They don’t want to do the work.

Shadow , (edited )
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

Oh look, it’s another old white guy trying to solve a problem he’s not affected by and probably hasn’t personally experienced.

Edit: Sorry that was so negative, but these are all pretty basic things you’re stating. Anyone likely to read this list and action items like this, is likely already staunchly pro black.

Would be good to see some more items that would make people do a double take and say “oh, I do that, I didn’t realize that could be construed as anti black”. Use your experience as a non black person to try and identify ways that a white person might be impacting black people unintentionally.

thenexusofprivacy OP ,

These things are basic, but most white people aren’t doing them – even people who think of themselves as staunchly pro Black. And there are multiple examples in the article of how white people might be impacting Black people unintentionally, for example thisiswomanswerk talks about how hand-wringing messages of symptay many times are themselves microaggresive, and suggestions like “Stop asking Black people for evidence of the anti-Blackness” and “Stop telling Black people that they’ll experience less racism if they change instances (aka servers)”

SweetCitrusBuzz , (edited )
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

Other suggestions:

Social problems cannot be solved by technical solutions e.g. “turning the racism off” by filtering or blocking others as a user (run from any instance that takes this approach instead of defederating or blocking at an instance level).

If your instance is shit and gets blocked, don’t complain that it got blocked, either complain to the admins of the shit instance or move instances.

Boost the things they say about their experiences or the experiences of others and boost things they care about because likely it’ll benefit people at the very least by raising awareness.

thenexusofprivacy OP ,

Thanks, all good points, I’ll try to work them in! The boosting is somewhat tricky, the general guideline is “boost posts tht people want boosted, don’t boost posts that they don’t want boosted”, but it’s not always clear which is which (unless they. have “Please boost” in there somewhere)

SweetCitrusBuzz ,
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

Sure! Happy to help. Yeah, it can be difficult to discern.

SweetCitrusBuzz ,
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

Another good point is as white people we have a responsibility to figure out if racists can see a boost. In that case we need to figure out a way to stop that harm immediately either by stopping certain followers or blocking/reporting etc.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Other suggestions?

Sure.

  1. Delete all the items on OP’s list.
  2. Don’t harass people for being black or white or anything else.
  3. Don’t actively go looking to start conflicts the way OP is.
verstra ,

This is all hard to do because it is hard to determine people’s race on lemmy. Some usernames give it away but most don’t. And I don’t go snooping trough their post history to find that out.

thenexusofprivacy OP ,

Yeah, the section on “Listen more to Black people” didn’t really cover the challenges on Lemmy. I added this:

If you’re on a platform like Lemmy which doesn’t yet have similar hubs, it’s more challenging. One option is to use other social networks, news aggregators, and search engines to find articles, papers, and videos by Black people – and post them yourself to help others listen.

How’s that?

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@quokk.au avatar

The internet is mostly Americans. Why do we need to give them more?

Nomad ,

Suggestion: treat black people like what they are. People. Like any other human.

How do you even suggest we detect black people around here? O.o

thenexusofprivacy OP ,

No, “color blindness” perpetuates structural racism. Here’s one study looking at that. Seeing Race Again Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines has a lot more, although it’s focused on law and academia.

Beacon ,

That doesn't apply to online forums. There is LITERALLY no way to determine someone's race from what they write. Unless you're suggesting we open every discussion by asking what a person's race is before we start talking to them? Better yet we can skip that and simply put demographic badges next to people's username, like a yellow star for Jewish people, a pink triangle for homosexuals, and... hm, that sounds familiar, where has that happened before?

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

Maybe add some kind of flag to ActivityPub that's set to your skin colour? Each comment could have a colored border corresponding to your skin tone.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It may sound crazy, but there is a precedent:

@Column('boolean', {
	default: false,
	comment: 'Whether the User is a cat.',
})
public isCat: boolean;
adespoton ,

Color blindness perpetuates structural racism. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a goldfish.

There’s the cultural issues, but those aren’t limited to African Americans vs White Americans on the Internet.

Your rules should apply to everyone, including those two groups. The trickier part is dealing with privilege.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •